John Hawthorne

John Patrick Hawthorne (born 25 May 1964) is an English philosopher, currently serving as Professor of Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California.

He is recognized as a leading contemporary contributor to metaphysics and epistemology.

Hawthorne was born on 25 May 1964 in Birmingham, England.

He earned his PhD from Syracuse University, where he studied with William Alston and Jonathan Bennett.

From 2006 to 2015, he was the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford.

He has also taught at the University of New South Wales, Arizona State University, Syracuse University, Rutgers University, and Princeton University.

Hawthorne's 2006 collection Metaphysical Essays offers original treatments of fundamental topics in philosophy, including identity, ontology, vagueness, and causation, which one reviewer called "essential reading for anyone currently engaged in analytic metaphysics".

In his book Knowledge and Lotteries, Hawthorne defends a view in epistemology according to which the presence of knowledge is dependent on the subject's interests (he calls this view "subject-sensitive invariantism").

Unlike contextualism, Hawthorne's view does not require that the meaning of the word "know" changes from one context of ascription to another.

His view is thus a variety of invariantism.

However, whether a subject has knowledge depends to a surprising extent on features of the subject's context, including practical concerns.

The American philosopher Jason Stanley holds a similar view.

Hawthorne has also written on philosophy of language and philosophical logic, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, and on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.